Philippe Vannier of Bull will give one of the ISC'11 Keynotes titled "The Road to Exascale Computing – A European Challenge?". From the titel you would expect the general request for European HPC investments however the teaser explains that it's an attempt of self advertisment. They stipulate the technological independence of Europe regarding HPC and state that the Tera 100 co-design with CAE proved that they give Europe all the necessary skill.

It's not the first time Bull tries to position itself as the "the" European HPC vendor and so they even falsly claim to have build "the first European-developed system to break the petaflops barrier". Well, no, actually this was Roadrunner - the first Petaflop system period with major developments and not only designs done in Boeblingen, Germany.

Without the keynote given yet let me give my personal answer to it here and why if you want to buy European, you should buy IBM.

First let me point out that we live in a globalized world. So what does it mean when Bull talks about technological independence of Europe? Systems developed in Europe and build in Europe from European developed and produced components ... bare metal, mainboard, processors, memory, harddisk, interconnect, storage, software, ...? I'm sorry to burst your bubble, however that is impossible and Bull cannot promise you that. The only thing they may be able to promise you is that they develop the assembly - design it - in Europe and assemble it in Europe with their less than 10.000 employees in Europe.

Now that's where I come to IBM. IBM is a globally integrated company with 400.000 employees all over the world and maybe about a quarter of them are in Europe, paying taxes. In Germany alone IBM has 20.000 employees with 2.000 developers working on Storage, Software, Mainframes and High Performance Computing. From Cell (the first Petaflop, you remember) over BlueGene to iDataplex ... European IBMers developed and are developing for what I would call the Global Challenge.

To summarize it in one sentence: If you want to buy a European solution, actually if you want to buy a Terran solution for that matter or if you just want to buy the best solution period, talk to your IBM representative.